Daynotes 1999 week 28

Daynotes: Week of 12 - 18 July, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 28

* Link to: last modified 02:40 GMT+2 on 19.07.1999

Hi, welcome to this week's daybook page.

himself See the update-link (above) that points where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that is easily done.

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Write me at: bo@leuf.com -- if private, mark it as such!
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Occasional thematic articles, see "DisISay" LeufOrg

Monday 12 July

Yahoo.geocities has notified me that my sites there will be removed during Monday. Fine.

I should really have deleted those legacy sites earlier, but somehow I was too busy with other matters. Like a couple of book chapters :) I still have a list of to-do updates to apply to various sections of my webs, but this week at least will largely be devoted to writing. That's the plan, but as co-author Tom well knows, plans are not all that often realized as planned. The family is however on notice, that this week will be markedly different from last week. Much less participation on my part, at least during my "scheduled" work hours.

Already one complication. One kitten has developed a serious eye infection of some sort, so we've booked in an animal hospital visit tomorrow for both of them. That's USD 80 minimum... sheesh. (All the vets around here seem to have started their vacation today. Only the hospital seems open. Goes for human doctors, dentists and other professionals as well. The dreaded Swedish summer shutdown has commenced.)

Despite the humid heat, and the flompity-flomp of kittens, I produced several thousand words of text today, albeit not all survived the ruthless hack&slash of self-edit. Remarkable achievement, although I do feel a bit wrung-out from it all.

I also spent some time worrying away at a non-obvious feature in Outlook that appears crippled. All items, irrespective of type have an read/unread status field, and in most contexts you can "Mark as Unread" any item. Now, it appeared to me that this would constitute a useful feature if imported items that affected the database (task updates, vCards, etc) marked the affected items as "unread". Seems logical, right? Well, forget it, it doesn't work that way in any of the experiments performed.

Bottom line at present is a MS-WTF format question mark.

Do you realize that a five-button mouse would let you enter most text directly with one hand? -- (overheard at the GUI team's table)

Tuesday 13 July

(Tuesday the 13th, Spanish unlucky day.)

Well, the kittens are back from the vet (USD 100 - ouch!), treated , groggy, with prescriptions, and a follow-up appointment booked.

So far the day has been muggy and for my part all tied up with laundry, while the wife, daughter and kittens were at the vet. Edward is deep into the restructuring of his website, now using image maps for links.

A long day, though likely longer for my suffering co-author who is being assimilated by the chinese boxes of Tasks functionality. (His day is not done for another 6 hours or so, given our timezone difference.) I at least slogged my way through laundry, kittens, and simply awful working weather to produce a respectable amount of text and tie together some decent descriptions. It's hard to type when fingers feel like half-cooked cucumber strips due to the humidity...

... Peaceful right now, just after 1 a.m., and refreshingly almost-cool. ...

I had several thought to write about during the day, but I was too busy untangling functionality -- seeing how things actually worked (or not), as opposed to how one might expect them to work, which is not the same as how they might be intended to work (but don't). Out of this mess is then distilled this precious essence called "insight" with which we imbue the work in progress -- which all of you, come the day, will buy and recommend far and wide, because MS products are a honey-trap, and once you move into them you are committed, and will need all the insight you can get to make them work in useful ways.

The basic problem... well, several basic problems with computer programs (and this is not new insight by any means) are:

the attempts to make killer applications that are all things to all men
the fact that it is still the applications that are the focus, never mind the illusion of data-type association and "document selects the application" smoke&mirrors trick.

These two are interrelated. Contrast this with the "data-flow and filter" approach to programming -- known in the Unix world as pipes. There you concatenate discrete functionality to achieve the desired results. Feed input to process A to do x. Fine. Simple. Oh, we want x to be formatted according to y? Ok, feed input to A as before, but let process B use the x as it is produced to make y and direct this to a file. And so on. This is old stuff. Modular. Well-understood. It works. Next year we need y2 not y. Replace or modify B alone. Maintainable. Scalable. Reusable components. Linux is built this way. Customizable. Modify on the fly without rebooting. Comes in endless flavors, all compatible.

I still have the book which was my formal grounding in these concepts: Software Tools (Kernigham and Plauger, Addison-Wesley 1976). In computing terms, it is ancient, but many of the concepts introduced are eternal. It is all about building small software tools that neatly dovetail together to make more complex functionality -- flexibly and dynamically. Of focusing on the data, not the code.

The modern-day equivalent to this approach is object oriented design (though I've been told by some that OO is now the past). Then again, I am also told that user-tweakable code is also a thing of the past -- yet we have Linux, coming stronger than ever, albeit in more naive-user friendly packaging.

Still, however, applications rule. Monolithic, proprietary-code, humongous applications rule. The concept of never leaving the program rules. In architecture, this is a huge building that contains everything you (or anyone else) could possibly need or want either piped in or within walking/elevator distance. This is attractive to some, just like luggable amplifiers with built-in radio, cassette, CD, mini-TV, mobile phone, alarm clock, Gameboy, GPS, fax and cigarette lighter. But it's not what I want when I'd like to listen to some music.

Worse, I really dislike knowing that my documents can only be properly accessed with version xyz of application ABC, because of a proprietary binary format.

"You have raisins," the Frenchman agreed in his halting English.

Wednesday 14 July

Am I ahead of myself or behind myself? What with timezones and late nights become mornings, I am not entirely sure when I am any more. It may be Thursday, early early a.m., but I am still in Wednesday mentally. I suppose that's another reason to run on noon rather than midnight date-shifts.

Every book must be chewed to get out its juice. -- Chinese proverb.
Every application must be chewed to get out its bugs. -- The Tom&Bo Corollary to the above.

Yep, Outlook is getting pretty chewed by now. I've been gnawing at some core functionality for some days now, spitting bugs and sundry indigestible bits. However, the chapter is getting to the marinate overnight stage now. Outlook on the Half-shell, with mayo. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't try to write these daynotes at 2 a.m.

I apologize to my readers for the short notes you have been getting lately. On the other hand, few of my readers are keeping up any discussions in WikiForum, so I guess it evens out <g>.

My long-suffering co-author has been getting little as well, for while our relationship started with lengthy "daily" exchanges on all subjects, including plans for co-authoring, the really intense writing and rewriting we had during a couple of months there sort of burned that out, and it has not yet resumed in any serious way. Writing takes time, often hours, even when recreational, and it is easy to lose the habit and hard to regain it in the constant shift of daily details and distractions. Obviously, our main focus is still the book, but we both long at times for the deadline-free days before contract. Of course, I'm not sure our respective wives notice much difference -- either way, we are "constantly" at the keyboard on one pretext or another <g>.

Thursday 15 July

Ouch, that was nasty... I had just pasted in a mail address into Outlook contacts, and it DrWatson'ed on me when I left the address field to check the email ones. As far as I can reconstruct it, what happened was that Outlook decided to query me on address components it could not parse (which would normally open a details dialog) while it was at the same time opening a context submenu. End result: an empty sub-menu box and a dead program. Caveat, I am running (still) beta 3, since the final code CDs destined to me seem to have vanished in the mail somewhere between postal warp gates.

Jerry Pournelle posted an interesting essay today: Of Crusaders Old and New, by Walter A. McDougall. Worth reading for perspectives on US foreign policy; past, present and future.

"Was it something I said?"
"It's more everything you say."
-- Londo and G'Kar

Friday 16 July

Well, let's see... the kittens got eye balm against an infection of some kind; doing better. However, no-one is really feeling all that great today -- half-high temperatures, sore muscles, headaches... Mother-in-law's "garden party" got a hosing from passing clouds, but evidently a grand time was had by all anyway, despite having to seek shelter for a time. I generally haven't done much of anything useful -- the day seemed just like a lot of unrelated details of one kind or another ambushing me each time I tried to focus on something. Some days are like that.

I need a focused day to read through the text that's been produced over the past week or so. To get an overall sense for what needs tweaking or slashing. Actually, maybe I should take some hours and write some SF again, further follow a few plot lines -- this clears the mind. Creative forces flowing in different channels.

I have two main fiction projects that I come back to from time to time, mostly to amuse myself.

One is based in a scenario created for roleplaying about 20 years ago. This was an interesting exercise at the time, because though RP rules were generally "fantasy", I designed an environment around just a changed, rather basic physical property, and threw in an SF kind of background (which the players knew almost nothing of). This proved much more intriguing than expected and gave an unusual rationale for what the players experienced as "magic". While all this played pretty much as the usual Sword&Sorcery for the participants, as gamesmaster I kept very close to the self-imposed groundrules. The fiction part grew as I continued to develop the how and why of the situation, the culture of the peoples encountered, and what it all was leading to.

I've thought of putting up some earlier shorter writings somewhere on my site, and have experimented with the html format for this. We'll see when that happens, but it has a low priority at present.

Poets who read their own verse in public may well have other disgusting habits.

Saturday 17 July

I fell into a kind of black hole this day, writing about shared menus. (Sorry for lack of an earlier update here.) As is so often the case with Office products, the menu commands open into sub-dialogs in seeming endless permutations, with several excursions into other Office components that are strictly speaking outside the scope of our book on Outlook. Yet I must still explore all the avenues for information that might still be important for the Outlook user. This takes a lot of time, and is really a Sisyphean labor to write about, because the exploration sequences have no neat convergent endings -- I must somewhere draw a fairly arbitrary line and hope I have not missed something vital. Then I have to stand back and find the appropriate perspective so that I can summarize the salient points in a way consistent with the rest of the book section. If I am lucky I have a nugget or two of useful non-obvious help that the future readers will really appreciate. Yup, I suppose panning for gold in a river is a decent analogy -- mind that the river is flooded and carrying a lot of other flotsam too (silt, rocks, bits of washed out bridges, trees, houses, cows, cars, ...). Distracting stuff.

To paraphrase a Pournellean motto: "We do all this so the reader won't have to."

At one point I had to reference the online help for Visual Basic. That was fun <g>, the more so because after that, F1 produced no other help file than VB in any context. In the end, I had to exit Outlook and restart it before I got back the normal context help. I sincerely hope this is a beta-version bug only.

Sunday 18 July

Bob Thompson has written up a good first impressions report on the Olympus D-400 Zoom digital camera. Impressive indeed. Want one. If you're at all contemplating getting a digital camera, read it.

* Did a lot of writing and pondering, pondering and writing today. Think I have wrapped up the chapter, so that Tom can review it. Not much time left over for anything else.

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